When Queenan was young, books were an escape hatch from life in a Philadelphia housing project "with substandard parents," including a father who "used books the same way he used alcohol: to pretend that he was not here".
For some reason many, many mothers, whether they work outside the house full-time, part-time or not at all, have this idea that they are being substandard parents if they are not arranging to have their children enriched in every possible way every possible day after school.
My new school was substandard, and neither my parents nor my teachers paid much attention to my education.
(The US government, keen to extinguish Native American culture, attempted to force Hopi children into substandard state-run schools; parents who resisted were jailed).
As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty — what a National Scientific Council report summarized as "overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil," and other forms of extreme stress — can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse.
We don't have outrage when children live in substandard housing because their parents pay predatory interest rates for their mortgage or pay rent to landlords who don't fix leaking roofs.
However, more work is needed to address substandard care provided for infants and their parents.
Mr. Huang is part of a loosely linked network of bereaved parents and activists who partly blame substandard school construction for the high toll from China's biggest natural disaster in decades.
There is the stress falling on parents as they leave children in substandard child care facilities to save money -- and the strain on friends and family who pitch in.
Schools, which need to be academically substandard for two years before they are eligible for parent-led changes, would again be subject to them at the end of this school year, Deasy said at the time.
